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edIII writes:

Hackers broke into the computer networks of some big U.S. law firms, including Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP and Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

Federal investigators are looking to see if confidential information was stolen for insider trading, as these law firms represented Wall Street banks and big companies, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Other law firms were also targeted, but the probe has not amounted to any clear information on what details have been stolen, the newspaper reported.

While it seems rather unimaginative and simplistic to think it was for theft, it leaves me wondering if this means more scandalous corruption will be revealed a couple of orders of magnitude greater than Sony/Snowden. I'm going to be watching Wikileaks and LiveLeaks myself to find out.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Software source codes and hardware designs tend to be closely guarded trade secrets. But researchers recently made the full design of one of their microprocessors available as an open-source system.

You can download the entire source code, test programs, programming environment, and even the bitstream for the popular ZEDboard for free at www.pulp-platform.org/.

Luca Benin, a professor at ETH Zurich involved with the project, says making the system open source maximizes the freedom of other developers to use and change the system. "It will now be possible to build open-source hardware from the ground up.

"In many recent examples of open-source hardware, usage is restricted by exclusive marketing rights and non-competition clauses," adds Benini. "Our system, however, doesn't have any strings attached when it comes to licensing."

The arithmetic instructions that the microprocessor can perform are also open source: The scientists made the processor compatible with an open-source instruction set developed at the University of California in Berkeley.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

The Guardian reports on a study published in the American Journal of Applied Science (PDF) about mammalian fossils exposed by erosion along the Irtysh River in Kazakhstan. Among them was a skull belonging to Elasmotherium sibiricum, the Siberian unicorn. Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers determined that the creature died 26 038±356 years ago. Previously, the species had been believed to have been extinct for 350,000 years.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Inhabitat reports (multi-page) that construction of a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait has received approval from the Russian government. The structure, set to be the world’s longest tunnel at 74 miles (132 km), will connect the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Alaska Railroad, allowing passengers and freight to travel from Helsinki to Buenos Aires entirely by rail. The tunnel will also contain an HVDC cable which will carry power between the Russian and North American electrical systems, creating a so-called "supergrid" that will reduce the need for base load power plants.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

According to Softpedia:

Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI), publisher of Debian™ GNU/Linux and Debian™ GNU/kFreeBSD™ has reached an agreement in its longstanding trade dress dispute with the Mozilla Corporation, publisher of the Firefox application suite. Under the agreement, SPI will pay an undisclosed sum to the Mozilla Corp. and periodically turn over marketing data regarding SPI's customers. In exchange, SPI will receive a nonexclusive license to distribute the Firefox suite as part of SPI's Debian™ products.

SPI agreed not to alter the branding of the Firefox suite; not to disable its Pocket integration; not to alter the suite's anti-phishing or search features, which are sponsored by Mozilla Corp. partners; and to discontinue its competing Iceweasel Web suite, which is based on Mozilla Corp. software licensed under a previous accord. The Firefox suite will be provided to SPI's Debian™ customers as an automatic update via the firm's Dpkg℠ service. The updates will go out over the course of the next three months to groups of randomly selected customers, in order to provide what SPI calls "a superior upgrade experience."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A humanoid obsessive has built an incredibly realistic female robot from scratch - and it's got more than a passing resemblance to Avengers star Scarlett Johansson.

Ricky Ma, a 42-year-old product and graphic designer, has spent more than $50,000 (£34,000) and a year and a half creating the female robot prototype, Mark 1.

The designer confirmed the scarily lifelike humanoid had been modelled on a Hollywood star, but wanted to keep her name under wraps.

It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone and has moving facial expressions, but Ricky says creating it wasn't easy.

He said he was not aware of anyone else in Hong Kong building humanoid robots as a hobby and that few in the city understood his ambition.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Manufacturing has become both bigger and smaller. During the past 10 years the worldwide value of manufactured products has grown, in inflation-adjusted terms, by more than 60 percent, surpassing US $12 trillion in 2015.

Meanwhile, the relative importance of manufacturing is dropping fast, retracing the earlier retreat of agriculture (now just 4 percent of the world's economic product). Based on the United Nations' uniform national statistics, the manufacturing sector's contribution to global economic product declined from 25 percent in 1970 to about 15 percent by 2015.

The decline has registered in the stock market, which values many service companies above the largest manufacturing firms. At the end of 2015, Facebook, that purveyor of updated selfies, had a market capitalization of nearly $300 billion, about 50 percent more than Toyota, the world's premier maker of passenger cars. And SAP, Europe's largest software provider, was worth about 75 percent more than Airbus, Europe's largest maker of jetliners.

And yet manufacturing is still important for the health of a country's economy, because no other sector can generate nearly as many well-paying jobs. Take Facebook, which at the end of last year had 12,691 employees, versus the 344,109 that Toyota had at the end of its fiscal year, in March 2015. Making things still matters.

The top four economies remain the top four manufacturing powers, accounting for about 55 percent of the world's manufacturing output in 2015. China is at the top of the list, followed by the United States (whose gross national product is still nominally No. 1), Japan, and Germany. But these countries differ markedly in the relative importance of manufacturing to their economies. The sector contributed about 28 percent of China's GDP in 2014, second only to South Korea, with 30 percent. In the same year, manufacturing's share came to about 23 percent in Germany, 19 percent in Japan, and only 12 percent in the United States total.

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butthurt writes:

Cryptomaster leviathan , so named because of its size and its habit of staying well hidden under forest debris, was discovered in 1969 in Oregon. The spider had been the only species known in its genus. However, arachnologists have now discovered that some Cryptomaster specimens have a pair of penile spikes, whereas others do not. Those lacking the spikes have been designated as a different species, Cryptomaster behemoth .

The research is published in ZooKeys. The Independent (has a photo) and LiveScience reported on it.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Nearly 10 per cent of teens in three Canadian provinces said they had gambled online in the past three months, according to a new study by researchers from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and the University of Waterloo. It's the first Canadian-based study to find such high levels of online gambling among youth.

Of all adolescents surveyed, 42 per cent reported that they had gambled money or something of value in offline (land-based) gambling or online gambling. Popular gambling activities included: a dare or challenge (22 per cent), instant-win or scratch tickets (14 per cent), games of skill, such as pool or darts (12 per cent), offline sports pools (9 per cent), and cards, such as poker and black jack (9 per cent).

"A substantially high proportion of young people are gambling in general, and mostly in unregulated forms, like in a dare or a game of pool, which are accessible to youth," says Dr. Tara Elton-Marshall, Scientist in Social and Epidemiological Research at CAMH and first author of the study, which was published this month in BMC Public Health. "The high proportion of teens who are gambling in any form is concerning because there is research to suggest that the earlier people start to gamble, the more likely it is to be an issue later on."

The findings come from 10,035 students in grades 9 to 12 (aged 13 to 19) who completed the 2012-2013 Youth Gambling Survey in schools in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Of course--the stakes were maple syrup spirits and Tim cards.

Original Publication: BMC Public Health, 2016; 16 (1) DOI: 10.1186/s12889-016-2933-0

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The UK, US, and Europe will be swapping nuclear waste as part of a rethink of how to handle such material:

David Cameron is to announce plans for the largest ever shipment of nuclear waste from the UK to the US. In return, the US will send a different type of used uranium to Europe where it will be used to help diagnose cancer. The BBC's James Landale said the PM's aim was to show that it is possible to think differently about how to dispose of nuclear waste. But Friends of the Earth said any transatlantic transportation of nuclear waste was a risk it advised against.

Mr Cameron will travel to the US later to announce the agreement at a summit on civil nuclear security in Washington. He will tell world leaders that Britain will transport 700kg of highly enriched uranium to the US from the Dounreay storage facility in Scotland. Officials said this would be the largest ever such movement of nuclear waste, which the US has more capacity to store and process. In return, a different form of used uranium will be transported from America to the European Atomic Energy agency (Euratom) where it will be turned into radio isotopes that are used to detect and diagnose cancer.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Physicists of MIPT (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences developed optical technology for the "correction" of light coming from distant stars, which will significantly improve the "seeing" of telescopes and therefore will enable us to directly observe exoplanets as Earth-twins. Their work has been published in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems (JATIS).

The first exoplanets (extra solar planets), which are the planets outside our solar system, had been discovered in the late 20th century, and now we have detected of more than two thousand of them. It is almost impossible to see the faint light of the planets themselves without special tools -- it is saturated "overshadowed" by the radiation of parent star. Therefore exoplanets are discovered by indirect methods: by registration of the weak periodic fluctuations in the luminosity of the star when a planet passes in front of its disk (the transit method), or by spectral translational vibrations of the star itself from the impact of the planet's gravity (the radial-velocity method). For the first time, in the late 2000s, astronomers were able to directly obtain images of exoplanets. So far we have about 65 of such images. To obtain them, the scientists use stellar coronagraphs first created in 1930s for observations of the solar corona outside eclipses known as solar coronagraphs. These devices have a focal mask -- an "artificial moon" inside them, which blocks some part of the field of view -- ultimately, it covers the solar disk, allowing you to see the dim solar corona.

To repeat this technique for the stars, we need a much higher level of accuracy and much higher resolution of the telescope, which accommodates a coronagraph. Apparent size of the orbit of Earth-type planets, nearest to us, is about 0.1 arcseconds. This is close to the resolution limit of modern space telescopes (for example, the resolution of the space telescope Hubble is about 0.05 seconds). To remove the effects of atmospheric distortions in ground-based telescopes, scientists use adaptive optics -- mirrors that can change shape while adjusting to the state of the atmosphere. In some cases, the mirror shape can be maintained with an accuracy of 1 nanometer, but such systems do not keep pace with the dynamics of atmospheric changes and are extremely expensive.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Entomologists collected specimens of arthropods from "free-standing houses" (not apartments, duplexes or row houses) in North Carolina. Among the organisms found, the great majority were not considered harmful to humans or their belongings, with only "a minority of the homes" harbouring pests. The authors characterise the household fauna as "a mix of closely synanthropic [link added] species and a great diversity of species that wander indoors by accident." The latter are thought to die soon after becoming trapped in a house.

Their work was published in PeerJ and the North Carolina State University has a blog post promoting it. PeerJ interviewed one of the authors.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A Bloomberg report that cited an estimated $24 billion total cost for a global recall of as many as 287.5 million faulty airbag inflators has been denied by Takata Corporation:

Takata Corp has denied it has calculated the cost of the global recall of its faulty airbags, after a report alleged it could be as much as 2.7 trillion yen ($24bn; £16.7bn). On Wednesday Bloomberg reported the figure citing unnamed sources.

Takata has acknowledged some airbag inflators explode with too much force and spray metal shrapnel into the car. The fault has been linked to the loss of ten lives globally, according the US traffic safety authority. Takata's shares plunged 20% after the report which called it the "auto industry's biggest recall ever", but were in positive territory on Thursday. "We have not announced anything to the effect of the report, and it is untrue that we have calculated the estimated costs (of the recall)," the Tokyo-based company said in a statement.

Previously: Takata Airbag Defect Leads to Largest Automotive Recall in U.S. History

Original Submission

jIyajbe writes:

A steadily spreading disease that's already killed millions of bats across the Eastern United States has made its way to the Northwest.

Tests on a little brown bat that died at a Seattle-area facility March 13 confirmed the animal had been infected with white-nose syndrome, spread by the Pseudogymnoascus destructans fungus, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday. The fungus sickens bats by eating away at their skin and disrupting their biological rhythms.

So far, more than 6 million North American bats have died from white-nose syndrome, which earns its name from the powdery film that appears on infected bats' muzzles.

Bats play a critical role in the ecosystem, pollinating plants and controlling insects that damage crops and spread disease. With bats' numbers suppressed by the fungus, the Bat Conservation International warns, "we can expect to see significant ecosystem changes in the coming years."

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2016/03/northwest_bad_discovered_with.html

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Salt can be dangerous, with too much of it causing blood pressure spikes. But what are we meant to do, just give it up?! Japan has a better solution.

The Electro Fork, developed at Tokyo University as part of the No Salt Restaurant project, harmlessly zaps salted flavour into unsalted foods, essentially using electricity as seasoning.

As well as stimulating the tongue to taste saltiness, the electronic signals can also be used to enhance sourness and food texture. Sweetness, however, has proven difficult to reproduce, sad news for dessert lovers everywhere.

At the end of the meal, do diners' hair stand on end ?

Original Submission